Thanks for the reply, though there have been other developments in my situation:
Of the two main choices for the quake 2 binaries, one of the tar files worked fine, one gives the behavior in my previous post. Since then, I've switched to Yamagi Quake 2, which will be very different, i'msure, and I've moved my project to arch linux due to the amount of reconstructing I'd have to do to tiny core to make it fit with my goals.
The only other time I've had an error in linux that gave me a "file not found" error for a file that was absolutely where I thought it was, the issue had to do with the file system having some weird interaction with the shell/file manager.
Out of curiousity, what does the command:
"file -kz /q2/quake2 && uname -a"
do? Thanks again for your interest.